Monday, September 30, 2013

Government shutdown, Obamacare, from the combox, and various and other sundry thoughts...

because I have a house to clean.

I know all good blogger advice is to dole out your posts bit by bit (byte by byte?) I don't know about you, but I don't have time for all that nonsense. I have a house to clean.

So here it all is, in one big blob that you can peruse at your leisure.

Government Shutdown

No biggie. Can't go to a federal park? Go to a local park instead.

Obamacare

Tuesday is Oct. 1st. Does anyone really believe that the interwebs are going to light up with all these poor uninsured people demanding their health insurance? Here's what's really going to happen. Nothing. That's right - absolutely nothing will happen. Most people don't even have the faintest idea of what it is all about. But that's okay since the government doesn't have any idea either.

One thing I am tired of hearing is the term "tax subsidies" for what is really the greatest transfer of wealth ever envisioned by the Socialist/Marxist/Commies who reside in DC? It is not a "tax subsidy." It's a direct payment to an insurance company to pay for insurance for people who exceed some mythical poverty line. Do you realize that in some states a family of four making 92K are going to be "subsidized" for to up to 7K for their insurance? What's up with that? Run some figures through the subsidy calculator provided by Kaiser, if you don't believe me.

From the Combox

I spend more time reading comments on articles than I do on most articles. I'm way more interested in what the "people" have to say than some authors. American Thinker, in particular, usually has a plethora of good comments.

From my combox last week we have this. (Some people just say it much better than I ever could.) In answer to my questions:

The primary question has been, "How did we, meaning the country, get to
where we are now?" We have a population of over 300 million people
being harassed by a government completely out of control.

The secondary question is, "How did the government, in particular the federal government, get so out of control?"

A reader had this to say:

dufekin

•
3 days ago

The answer to your question is simple: our country increasingly
rejects Almighty God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, Who planted His
natural Laws in our hearts and instead confusedly labels evils like
killing babies as good while deriding the bounty of the Lord as evil.
We subsidize and encourage otherwise failing behavior while of course
denying so doing.
You see, the problems with America fundamentally aren't merely
political, although they do manifest in the political sphere. Half the
country--the half in which neither you nor I live--at least approves or
even actively celebrates the wholesale massacre of a million unborn
Americans every year and longs for next year, when the Patient
Protection Affordable Care Act will compel those Americans in the other
half--our half--to subsidize the annihilation of hundreds of thousands
of unborn Americans.

But even here in the most conservative of states, Oklahoma, all is
not well, even absent interference from Washington. Just down the road,
a group of people intentionally rip unborn Americans from their
mothers' wombs and dismembered to death with impunity. Those
mothers--God have mercy on them, please--often suffer terribly. The
baby never chooses this end, but the mothers often arrive under duress
and in deep confusion. They leave with deep physical and spiritual
wounds that never heal absent the grace of God.

Our society is confused, depressed, insane, rejecting the God Who
made us, and in favor of what, of whom? Our spirits long, our bodies
pine for God, the living God. Yet almost everything in our secular,
increasingly forcefully imposed culture obscures that God, turns us away
from God, contradicts the Wisdom and the science and the knowledge and
the cognizance of God, supplanting them and Him with its own purported
wisdom, nominal science, fallaciously based but enticing knowledge, and
social-media cognizance that leaves our souls unfed and our spirits
empty.

In this half of the country, we often delude ourselves into acting as
though passing an hour or two halfheartedly in an ecclesial community
on Sunday and praying occasionally during times of quandary or physical
pain suffice to oppose the overbearing influence of the secular
worldview. Those practices indubitably help us, but we often do not
recognize how intensely our culture contravenes the Gospel and how
insidiously our culture, our assumptions, our fundamental philosophy
rejects God and Truth and beauty and right in favor of something that we
know internally as utterly false and even at times depraved. I say
this almost by way of confession and certainly not to declare my
innocence.

Let me close with the final words of the Old Testament, the Word of
the Lord through Saint Malachi in the Old Testament, which prophecy
Saint John the Baptist, who, Saint Luke tells us in his Gospel,
fulfilled in the spirit and power of Saint Elijah:

"Remember the law of Moses my servant, whom I charged at Horeb With statutes and ordinances for all Israel. Now I am sending to you Elijah the prophet, Before the day of the LORD comes, the great and terrible day; He will turn the heart of fathers to their sons, and the heart of sons to their fathers, Lest I come and strike the land with utter destruction.

"Turn the hearts of fathers to their children." Want to know how to
correct what is wrong with America today? Turn the hearts of fathers to
their children. Well, 41% of fathers, according to the National Vital
Statistics Report, vanish from the marital bond between the conception
of their children and the birth of the same children. Some of these
children indeed enter into the light of day after those fathers die
prematurely, and on these widows and orphans we must have compassion.
Others so mistreat women that they father babies and then scurry away.
But regardless of the exact breakdown, the statistic reveals a terrible
illness among American men. And what does the prophet foretell of the
society where fathers disregard their children? The Lord shall "come
and strike the land with utter destruction."

And therein lies the
problem with America today. Where did the fathers go? When
children--and we all are children, regardless of our age--lack the
stability and love that married parenthood provides, when they lack the
guidance and example of a loving earthly father, when they lack
knowledge of their Heavenly Father, they seek fatherhood elsewhere, in
big government in part.

As a society that increasingly rejects God and the law that He wrote
on our hearts, a society that bizarrely even rejects the simple
biological realities of parenting, a society wherein fathers reject and
neglect even their own innocent children and the vulnerable mothers of
the same children, we increasingly place faith, hope, and trust in
loveless big government, a trend that reaches its apex in a society like
the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea. Is Obama, Congress,
and big government our god, or shall we worship and depend on and trust
and follow the law of Almighty God, Who is Truly God? As Saint Elijah
asked on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:21), how long will we straddle the
issue? If the Lord is God, then follow him; if big government were
god, then we must overtly reject the True God and follow big government
as god, as we increasingly do. Will God strike our land with utter
destruction? Even if He does not so strike us, we will have struck
ourselves, for our very philosophy can yield no easy yoke or light
burden for our spirits.

I apologize for the extreme length of this post. Perhaps I should attempt brevity next time.

Please, Dufekin - no apologies needed and do not, under any circumstances, attempt brevity.

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About Me

My name is Adrienne and I want to welcome you to my world. I have a daylily nursery in beautiful North Idaho and specialize in personal service. I am a life long gardener and a Master Gardener but I believe that simple is best.
I love to design interiors and gardens, paint, and read.
My other interests are my Catholic faith and politics.